Fridays with Franklin

We’ve yet to see snow (he whispered, nervously) but winter has arrived in Chicago. This means that my friend Rosamund, shown here...has taken to sleeping at night wrapped in both the duvet and the electric blanket with her cold nose buried in my warm armpit.* I can’t blame her. I have more fur on my chest than she does, poor darling...

My friend Euclid is always going on about how a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. I usually just tune it out, but staring at this length of free-form crochet really brought the point home to me...

By freeform standards, my form was not all that free. I was using one motif; albeit in two different weights with two different yarns, the finer of which (Schoppel Wolle Zauberball®) was gradually changing color. Even so, I struggled. My earliest blossoms were lopsided and scrunched, with a tension that could be kindly described as clenched...

It probably speaks volumes about me that even my freeform crochet adventure had to start with some kind of plan.

...

The more I thought it over, the more the idea of creating a delicate fabric of scattered blossoms appealed to me. It was, for one thing, the opposite of the crochet I’d known growing up. That crochet came in two flavors: the zigzag afghan and the daisy place mat...

Rosamund is still waiting patiently for her new sweater...Before we go further, let’s take a closer look at the place where all the action is going to happen: the bridge.

The bridge is the fabric we created specifically so that we could cut it open. Our version–used in making the leg openings for Rosamund’s sweater–requires an odd number and a minimum of five. This swatch steek has seven stitches, worked in reverse stockinette.

I knew from the first that I wanted to work this piece in the round, with steeks cut for the forelegs. That aroused comment, because there is a widespread sentiment in the knitting community about steeks...

With my Hikoo Simpliworsted and measurements at the ready,it was time begin to cooking up a sweater for Rosamund.

It would be a very simple sweater, likely quite imperfect, meant to serve as a fitting guide for other, more complex designs. Rosamund is going to need a whole wardrobe, you see. This is no ordinary dog. This is a dog so clever, good-tempered...